Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  She was still at work late that night, waiting for things to open up in London so that she could confer with some of her colleagues there and suggest some leads for them to pursue while she slept. Her mobile rang and she saw Richard’s name on its screen. “Just calling to check in,” Richard explained. An awkward pause followed as she waited for him to go on. But then she understood that he was really just trying to find out whether she had unearthed any leads, found any scrap of hope, during the hours since he’d last seen her. She could only mumble corporate-sounding buzzwords: drilling down, expanding the envelope, going into the corners of the search space. If those phrases sounded as bad to Richard as they did to her, it was a wonder he didn’t just borrow his brother’s sidearm and put himself out of his misery.

  Richard informed her that he and John and Jake had spent the entire day sitting around his condo in a helpless and despondent condition, “driving each other crazy,” and that rather than waste any more time thus, they had agreed that they would leave town first thing in the morning, flying direct to Elphinstone so that they could drive one another crazy in the more beauteous environment of Schloss Hundschüttler. Olivia, who had quite enjoyed the drink in the cerulean-collar bar, expressed sincere regret that she would not get another opportunity to see him. But data were now coming in thick and fast from all those resources and scary-smart people in D.C., and since she had devoted much of the preceding day to complaining, albeit politely, about the lack of progress, she could not very well leave the office at this time to go and have another beer with the decidedly irrelevant Mr. Forthrast.

  And after that, another twenty-four hours blew by as if it were nothing. It must have been because she was working now, or, like a cerulean-collar worker, putting on an ironical performance of work, and when people worked, time went by fast.

  MI6 higher-ups were asking her to supply daily updates on the progress of the NAG, and before going to bed she wrote one that she did not enjoy writing at all. All day she had, in her mind, been “making progress” according to some artificial metric of what that meant: emails read and written, databases scanned, checklists ticked off, images pondered over. But since none of that work had actually led to the identification of the business jet in question, or to any evidence whatsoever that it had entered the United States, it was only progress in a negative sense. Another day of such progress and the NAG would be dead and buried, and she would be on a flight back to London.

  And so as she lay awake in bed in her hotel room, her mind wandered north across the Canadian border, all of a hundred miles from here.

  It wasn’t as if they hadn’t discussed this. Canada was bloody enormous, of course. Everyone knew it, but it never really sank in until one spent time looking at the maps. British Columbia alone was one-eighth the size of the whole Lower Forty-Eight. But they hadn’t been able to construct a sensible narrative as to why Jones, given his own personal business jet, would choose to land it there. Nothing against Canada, of course, which all agreed was a perfectly lovely country, but there simply wasn’t anything in it that would make for a sufficiently juicy target to make the journey worth it for a man like Jones. If Canada had been selling arms to Israel and pounding Pakistan with drone strikes, Jones would take delight in knocking over the CN Tower or car-bombing a hockey game, but as matters stood he would have to get into the United States or else make a laughingstock of himself.

  Getting across that border at a legitimate crossing would, of course, be out of the question. He would have to sneak across somewhere. And so if he were barreling south in a business jet, flying below the radar or else shadowing a passenger plane, pulling up short and setting it down north of the border would be nonsensical.

  But, but, but. Plans didn’t always go perfectly. It was a mistake to get in the habit of thinking of Jones as a superman. Perhaps he’d run short of fuel. Perhaps something had gone wrong en route and forced them to truncate the journey. Both hypotheses were sound. But both brought the NAG into the realm of free-form speculation. Every clever analyst in the CIA and MI6 could probably spend the next year dreaming up scenarios along such lines, none of which could be disproved, all of which were, therefore, equally worthless.

  The next day was Friday, the beginning of her third full day in Seattle and, she suspected, her last. The FBI agents and the analysts in D.C. would happily work through the weekend and expect her to do the same, but her early-morning emails from London clearly suggested that if she had not, by the end of the day, been able to dredge up even a single shred of evidence in support of the NAG, then perhaps her talents could be put to other uses.

  She still had intelligence contacts up in Vancouver: the nice people she had occasionally taken tea with during her “spy Disneyland” years at the university there. She reached them and began doing a little bit of gardening around the idea of the SNAG, the Shortened North American Gambit; and when they did not turn her down flat, she began to push on it. Her methods were utterly mendacious. When talking to Canadians, she suggested that their national security was being given short shrift by Yanks who believed that nothing north of the border really mattered; and when talking to Brits, she made lots of reference to the frightfully clever American analysts and all of the whiz-bang technology they’d used to search for evidence.

  UNDER A VAST blue sky that offered generous space for lively cumulus clouds to gambol and clash, the double-outrigger boat slid southward with little more than a faint burbling noise of bow wave against hull planks, and the occasional slap as the sharp prow reached out over a breaker and dropped into the trough behind it. The coastline to port gradually became more settled-looking, with radio towers breaking the profile of the coastal hills and occasional villages: mosaics of brightly colored tarps and awnings right along the waterfront, and birds’ nests of slender brown poles woven among frail pilings in the water before them and festooned with green fishnets. Hilltops had been denuded of trees in some kind of draconian logging campaign and left covered with a khaki-colored pelt of low vegetation gashed with eroded gullies that had stained the formerly white beaches below them with shit-colored muck. A point came when they could no longer remember the last time they had been unable to see any buildings along the shore, and then they rounded a small headland, a beat-up prominence of brown rock shaped like a clenched fist, and came in view of a town of some size: a crescent-shaped beach, still several miles ahead of them, lined with buildings as much as eight stories high, which they gaped at as if they were lifelong jungle dwellers, and, nearer to hand, the usual agglomeration of smaller habitations and makeshift open-air markets along the waterfront, interrupted in the middle by a big pier reaching out into the sea and connected by hinged spans of diamond-tread steel to a facility on the shore that was obviously a ferry terminal. Obviously, anyway, to Yuxia and Marlon, who saw them all over the place in their part of the world, and easy enough for Csongor to figure out even though he had been raised in a landlocked country. The road leading into it was wide, and congested just now with several buses and some smaller vehicles. The boatman gestured out to sea, drawing their attention to a larger vessel that was lumbering up the coast from the south, wreathed in a black nimbus of smoke: a passenger ferry from Manila. This explained the crowd of vehicles that had gathered at the terminal.

  The crew struck the sails as the skipper got the motor started again, and a few moments later the boat’s prow was knifing into the sand of the beach, and local boys ranging from toddlers to teenagers were running up to it and putting on a great cheerful pantomime of being helpful, perhaps in the hope of earning, or at least receiving, tips. Marlon and Yuxia and Csongor vaulted over the gunwale into warm, knee-deep water and sloshed ashore and then went through an interminable ceremony of smiling and handshaking and nodding and good-byeing, which used up almost all of the time remaining before the large ferry pulled into the terminal. Finally they disengaged themselves and walked up the beach, followed by a fascinated crowd of youths helloing them, and clambered up a low seawall
of broken-up concrete rubble and into the paved area before the terminal. The temperature had gone up by ten degrees, and suddenly they were all perspiring. For the first time in weeks, the smells of crowded human places—charcoal and diesel, incompletely treated sewage, cigarette smoke, garlic—came into their nostrils. Marlon raised the question of whether they should just get aboard that ferry right now and ride it into Manila, which was a place where he reckoned he could make connections with his cousins. But a look at the schedule told them that it would not be departing for some hours yet, and they had all seen, on their way in, that row of buildings along the beach south of here, which showed every sign of being hotels. Since they had no real plan and were in no particular hurry, they agreed to ride a bus into the town and find hotel rooms, which would undoubtedly be cheaper here than in the metropolis, and see if this beach town sported any Internet cafés where they might (if Marlon was to be believed) reap enough gold to pay for suites at the Manila Hotel and purchase first-class tickets to whatsoever destination they chose. So they merged with the crowd streaming off the ferry—perhaps a couple of hundred people all told—and tried to sort out which bus they should get on.

  Among those passengers was a far higher proportion of Caucasians than one would expect in a somewhat remote provincial town, and it seemed reasonable to guess that they were headed for the hotels along the beach. Most of them acted as if they’d been here before and knew where they were going. These headed, not surprisingly, for the larger buses idling before the terminal. The smaller vehicles—colorful, largely homemade van/bus hybrids—drew a clientele consisting exclusively of Filipinos. Csongor overheard a white man speaking in English as he shouldered his way across a current of passengers toward a bus, and so caught up with him and asked him whether that bus was going to the hotel district. The man turned and looked him up and down carefully, then informed him, none too warmly, that it was so. Csongor nodded back to Marlon, who stood head and shoulders above most of the crowd, and Marlon relayed the news to Yuxia, who was lost in it, and they followed Csongor up the stairs and onto the bus.

  It smelled of perfume, diesel, and cigarettes. At least half of the people on the bus were white. But it was now obvious that this population was crazily out of whack demographically: 100 percent of the white persons were males, and most of them were over fifty. They tended to dress as if they thought they were going on some sort of safari, and they liked to wear sunglasses even when they were sitting behind tinted windows on the bus. Their English was accented in a way that Csongor could not place at first. His first guess was that they were British, but that wasn’t quite right. “These dudes are from Oz,” Yuxia said, after she and Csongor and Marlon had crammed themselves together into the rearmost row of seats. When that made no impression, she explained, “Australia. Or maybe New Zealand.” Apparently she knew this because of her experience dealing with backpackers in her former life. So Csongor gazed up the bus’s aisle at the Australians-or-maybe-New-Zealanders and tried to figure out what was going on. Maybe some sort of trade convention—a batch of retired plumbers or jackaroos, or something, who had commandeered a block of hotel rooms for a week of very inexpensive fun in the sun. But it didn’t feel that way. None of these men was acquainted, none talked to another—which perhaps explained why the guy Csongor had accosted had given him such a look. They tended not to sit next to each other on the bus. Instead, each sat alone, or else shared a seat with a young Filipino woman. The demographics of the bus’s Filipina population were just as crazy: all female, every one of them either quite young or well into middle age. The young ones could be mistaken for women in their twenties because of the way they were dressed and made up, but on closer inspection seemed to be in their late or even middle teens. Some of them seemed to be on their own, but most were accompanied, though at a distance, by mature women, old enough to be their mothers, who, by and large, were making no strenuous effort to seem glamorous.

  All these impressions sunk in over the course of a fifteen-minute ride to the waterfront district that they had glimpsed from the boat. Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia all stared fixedly ahead, as if each was afraid to make eye contact with the others and reveal what was going through his or her mind. When the bus pulled up to a terminal in front of a hotel, they waited until it had nearly emptied out, and then got up as one and marched down the aisle with Yuxia sandwiched closely between Csongor and Marlon. No discussion, no exchange of looks, had been necessary to decide upon that arrangement. When Csongor presented himself in the exit of the bus, blocking most of its door as he paused at the top of the steps, he was greeted by the sight of half a dozen Filipina girls looking up at him with widely varying levels of enthusiasm: some flashing big smiles, others pouting and bored or even openly hostile. But as he came down the steps and it became obvious that he was being followed by a petite Asian female who was, in turn, being followed by an Asian man, they all seemed to jump to the same conclusion, and they turned their backs on him and drifted away in the direction of other buses that were pulling in.

  And yet it was an orderly place, and none of them felt any particular sense that they had stepped into a slum. To Csongor it felt very little different from Xiamen. The built environment was cheaply constructed three-to six-story buildings jammed in next to one another to form contiguous blocks, separated by crowded streets and fronted by a mixture of colorful signs and makeshift antitheft measures. It was, in other words, the classic streetscape of emerging Asian economies, and the only thing that made it unusual was that the signs were in English. Or, farther from the main drag, a hybrid of English and something that he did not recognize.

  There was a strong argument for getting the hell out of there and taking the next ferry to Manila, but Csongor had become fixated on the idea that, only a few yards away, looming above them, were a large number of reasonably modern hotel rooms with beds and showers. It was anyone’s guess what they’d have in the way of telephones, but on the opposite side of the waterfront drive, facing the row of hotels, he was able to count three Internet cafés in the space of a single block. So, without much discussion, the three gravitated in the direction of the hotel that seemed largest and newest, and presently found themselves in its dark and cramped lobby, being evaluated by young females in tight dresses who were lounging on the few available seats, as they checked in to a room. The plan at first was to get one room for Csongor and Marlon and another for Yuxia, but halfway through the check-in process, when it became evident that the rooms were going to be situated on different floors, Yuxia changed her mind and announced that she would be sleeping on the floor or the sofa of Marlon and Csongor’s room. Which meant, of course, that she would have a bed and Marlon or Csongor would sleep on the floor. So they got only one room. As it happened, this brought the price down low enough that they were able to pay for it using American dollars from Zula’s wallet, and thereby avoid using Csongor’s credit card. Csongor had no idea whether any authorities—Chinese, Hungarian, or otherwise—had put a trace on his card, but still it seemed wisest not to use it unless he had to.

  The room was up on the fourth floor, small and dark, with stained shag carpet, smelling of tobacco, alcohol, and sex. Yuxia stormed directly to the window and opened it as far as it would go—about six inches—to let in a bit of a sea breeze.

  It seemed as though the shower would be busy for a while, and so Csongor went back down to the street and walked to a bureau de change that he had noticed earlier and changed all of the euros from his wallet and the Canadian dollars from Peter’s into local currency. He was slightly offended, but hardly surprised, that they would not accept Hungarian forints. He also ducked into four different Internet cafés and found them well patronized by Caucasian males who were generally using them to look at dirty pictures. They varied in size, quality of equipment, hours of operation, and general level of friendliness. Only one of them, NetXCitement!, claimed to be open twenty-four hours, which Csongor thought might be useful given that the evening was already wearing o
n and they would probably be busy, for a few hours yet, getting cleaned up and fed and clothed.

  He bought some Chinese food from a stall on the street and took it up to the room, trying to fight back the almost overpowering urge to rip the garlic-scented containers open and plunge his face into them. A hand-lettered DO NOT DISTURB! sign was up on the door of the room, held in place by the door having been slammed shut on it. Csongor opened the door, brought the food in, then went back and carefully replaced the sign. “Why do we need this?” he asked Yuxia, who was sitting on one of the beds with a towel wrapped around her body just below the armpits. Marlon was still finishing up in the bathroom.

  “Hos,” she announced, “keep coming around to ask if we want anything.” Making air quotes around the final two words.

  Csongor felt as if he should be abjectly apologizing in the name of every white male who had ever lived, but he didn’t know quite where to begin. He still had not quite gotten his mind around the nature of this place and what went on here—particularly the middle-aged ladies, who seemed to be acting in approximately the same role as pimps, but who didn’t seem like professionals. They seemed almost like chaperones. But singularly ineffectual ones.

  “I’m sorry that this is the first place outside of China that you have ever seen,” Csongor said. “It’s not all like this. Someday I will take you to Budapest and show you around. Very, very different.”

  “First we have to get the eff out of here,” Yuxia pointed out.

  “I got some local money,” Csongor said. “Enough to buy this.” He nodded at the food, whose aroma, by now, had drawn Marlon out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “We can all get some cheap clothes and pay for maybe one more night here.”

  “Aren’t you going to get in touch with your mother?” Yuxia asked, sounding a bit shocked. “Can’t she send you money?”